The War in Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page A

angels who will not join us can have it for all eternity for all I care. Let them see how they like it.”

     
    The huge red sun was like a brightly burning mass of coal before him as Cordon walked across the Plains of Hegath. The slowly decomposing carcasses of a myriad of birds of prey littered the grounds around him. Only a few still pirouetted overhead and feasted upon the bodies of the humans around him. Indeed, there were many humans whose only torment now was the blazing sun and merciless heat. Merciless heat? Hardly. They didn’t realize how good they had it. The environment here was mild compared to the land to the west. There, 6,000 miles beyond the horizon, in the realm of Hades, the ground blazed at oven temperatures—nearly 300 degrees. The humans sentenced to that place didn’t need voracious tormenting birds to complete their suffering, the torrid environment was sufficient, reducing their bodies to desiccated husks.
    Cordon had traveled there on occasion, and was always only too happy to return to the more temperate clime of Zurel or Termantus. Even the frigid realm of the Continent of Darkness was far preferable to that blazing inferno directly beneath the red sun.
    His mind wandered back to this place. It would require some work before it was once more up to the master’s standards. What a mess. He picked up one of the fallen birds, or at least what was left of it. He held in his hand a decapitated body. He gazed around, trying to determine which head was once attached to this particular body. Well, it didn’t really matter.
    What was certain was that the head had not been severed from the body from the outside by some sharp instrument. The neck had somehow been severed from within, as if something had exploded in its throat.
    Cordon turned his attention to the pair of dark shredded wings that had been discovered by the demonic guard who had come to relieve Rathspith, wings that allegedly belonged to the missing minion. He examined them more carefully. The removal of these wings had not been facilitated with a sword or other straight blade. These wings had been chewed off at their roots. It made Cordon cringe. Demons and angels alike tended to be pretty sensitive when it came to their wings. He looked around nervously; nothing else out of the ordinary caught his eye.
    What could have done this, and why?
Cordon thought.
To keep you from flying off as you were carried away? Carried away by a cloud?
He scanned the ground around the wings; there had been a fierce struggle. Then he saw tiny prints in the sand, myriads of them, overlapping, crisscrossing, but prints of what? They were not the prints of an insect. They were almost like miniature footprints of an angel or human; they had a clubbed appearance, but a hundred times smaller. They were around the severed wings and the altars as well.
    Then he noticed larger prints—the footprints of large bipeds. He knelt down to examine them. They were those of a group of angels, demons, or humans. He pondered what he had seen in the twenty minutes he had been here. This was a crime scene. There were a lot of clues, but right now they didn’t quite fit together. Cordon really wasn’t cut out to be a detective. It wasn’t what he was made for. Under normal conditions, there was no need for a detective in Hell.
    Cordon rose to his feet and proceeded toward the altar from which a human soul had been taken. It wasn’t a long walk, only fifty yards or so, but all along the way the eyes of many humans were upon him. What might they know? He would begin the questioning immediately around the altarfrom which their compatriot in pain had been taken, and extend the search out from there if need be. He decided he would offer them a carrot rather than a stick. It was not that he had any real sympathy for humans, he did not; however, an enticement would require less effort on his part and would be more discrete, something that Lord Molock insisted upon.
    As he stood before